THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: THE MAYOR; Giuliani Takes Political Roles In Other States

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After rarely venturing out of New York City for the first nine months of his mayoralty, Rudolph W. Giuliani stood last week in the grand white living room of a home in the Detroit suburbs flashing grin after grin as local Republicans posed for pictures beside him, Michigan's Governor and the Republican candidate for state attorney general.

Mr. Giuliani was just moving into his fund-raising pitch for the long shot in the attorney-general race, John A. Smietanka, when a man murmured a number -- the size of New York City's budget gap. "What?" Mr. Giuliani asked. "Our deficit? We're going to overcome it." He mentioned cost-cutting and privatization before turning his focus back to the out-of-town politics.

While New Yorkers wonder will he or won't he support the Republican contender for governor, George E. Pataki, Mr. Giuliani has stepped gingerly onto the national political trail, endorsing Republicans in his own image: those who favored the Federal crime bill, or support abortion rights, or once served, as he did, as a Federal prosecutor.

He has visited Connecticut, New Jersey and Detroit and plans to stump for candidates in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has used some of his appearances to spell out a vision of a more centrist Republican Party, one that will recognize that it is now electing big-city mayors and will be more responsive to urban concerns.

And two weeks ago in Atlanta, Mr. Giuliani told Republican women to fight to remove the anti-abortion plank from the national party platform in 1996 -- taking his message to the backyard of Representative Newt Gingrich, the more conservative Republican who is the House minority whip and may be the Speaker if Republicans win a majority in the House.

The travel comes at a time when Mr. Giuliani's failure to back Mr. Pataki has riled Republicans across New York State. Some see the endorsements as a way to assure his party that he is a loyalist while at the same time making ties he could need if Mr. Pataki wins and threatens to eclipse him as the up-and-coming New York Republican.

Mr. Giuliani calls the timing coincidental and says he would have supported the out-of-state candidates no matter where he stood in the New York race.

He said that several of the candidates, like Mr. Smietanka, a former Federal prosecutor, were friends from his days in the Justice Department. Over all, he said, the group was largely what he would describe as "fiscal conservatives and social moderates" who he thought would be sympathetic to the concerns of New York City.

"The more relationships that I can develop, the more people you can win over, it makes it much easier to call on the phone and explain to them the position that New York City can be in," he said in an interview. "The more of this that I can do and do strategically, the more effective I can be if fights like the crime bill come up again."

Mr. Giuliani is not the only newly elected Republican out on the campaign trail. Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey had preceded him to Michigan and was the star attraction at Mr. Pataki's Manhattan fund-raiser last week. It is not lost on Republican officials that it is such early steps on the political hustings that help a future candidate build visibility and a base of support.

"You help people and you help yourself," said Chuck Yob, a Republican national committeeman from Michigan who was helping shepherd Mr. Giuliani through the Detroit suburbs last Tuesday.

Mr. Giuliani deflects questions about his ambitions. "I have a simple view about the future -- try to do your job the best you can," he said. "I don't think that in a job like mayor you spend a lot of time thinking about the future or you make a big mistake."

His aides and political advisers, however, openly speculate about a possible governor's race or Vice-Presidential bid.

But can a Republican Mayor of New York City remain mainstream enough for his own party? While Mr. Giuliani's fiscal conservatism is in line with Republican economic policies, the Mayor has increasingly struck a course that has put him at odds with other Republicans -- whether it be stumping at President Clinton's side for the Federal crime bill or flirting politically with Mario M. Cuomo, the Democratic Governor, at a time when Republicans have their best shot at the Governor's Mansion in Albany in 12 years.

And recently, as he has maintained that New York does not get its fair share of Federal aid, he has used Mr. Gingrich's Georgia as an example of a state that gets more than its share. During his first months in office, Mr. Giuliani often referred instead to President Clinton's Arkansas in such a context.

Such political independence has caused Mr. Giuliani's popularity ratings to rise in predominantly Democratic New York City. But some officials wonder whether he is hurting his ability to seek a higher office in the Republican Party, making comparisons to John V. Lindsay, the city's last Republican Mayor, who was re-elected on the Liberal Party line and later became a Democrat.

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"You have to be a different kind of Republican to be elected Mayor of New York City," said Guy V. Molinari, the Republican Borough President of Staten Island, who broke with Mr. Giuliani over his support for the Federal crime bill.

"But you can't change overnight and become a Republican with a capital R and expect the party statewide and nationwide to embrace you. There are too many other Republicans out there with solid credentials who have first call."

Mr. Giuliani's description of Mr. Smietanka's credentials last week on a Detroit radio talk show provided a glimpse at how he may be trying to position himself in an era in which voters are angry at government and suspicious of politicians.

He spoke of "a time in which people want someone who can make decisions, as opposed to what I think they describe as someone with a total political background, someone who has been in politics, their whole career is politics."

With Republicans divided and expected to be in a battle to define their party's soul in 1996, Mr. Giuliani has also been calling for a centrist party that would find positions in favor of gay rights and abortion rights palatable.

At a breakfast meeting in Atlanta with Republicans who favor abortion rights, Mr. Giuliani said a political party that favored laissez-faire government in fiscal affairs should also allow people to make choices in their personal lives.

"For a party which has such a strong belief in economic choice -- which really comes out of the notion of freedom -- it would seem to me that it would be entirely consistent that that choice would also extend to the most personal and difficult decisions that people have to make," he said.

"What we have to do is get as many people back to the center of the Republican Party as possible," he said. "I believe that is a battle that will be fought out over the next two years, and frankly I think it will determine whether we win the Presidency, irrespective of the position that President Clinton is in right now. With very, very few exceptions, you can't win Presidential elections by appealing to extremes. You win Presidential elections by appealing to the broad goals of the American people."

For now, as a Republican Mayor of New York City, Mr. Giuliani is a curiosity. With Mr. Smietanka at his side, Mr. Giuliani fielded questions from Ronna Romney, a talk show host back on the airwaves after her recent narrow loss for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate from Michigan.

Mrs. Romney, a feisty conservative whom a local columnist described as having a tongue that could "strip the varnish off the living-room floor," showed none of her tough side in questioning Mr. Giuliani. She asked about his son, Andrew. Whether the Mayor goes to bed wondering if he is really up to the job. Whether it is harder to be Mayor of New York or Los Angeles.

"I think that when you won, it was really the beginning of perhaps a historical breakthrough in politics in America," Mrs. Romney said, unabashedly confessing during a break that in this particular interview she was not playing hardball.

Mr. Giuliani was able to use his air time on WJR to enunciate a Jack Kemp-style vision of home ownership for the urban poor and to say that the election of Republican mayors like himself give the party "a new opening, a new opportunity, and some of the programs of the party now have to open up to the cities, to make themselves relevant to cities."

There were a few signs that Mr. Giuliani, who may seem slightly right of center in heavily Democratic New York City, felt the balance shift on him among Republican circles in Michigan. He remained quiet when Mrs. Romney made an off-air sardonic reference to homosexuals in New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade. But when she said she would like to see prisoners packed four to a cell to make prison "a really lousy experience," he interrupted.

"Now there's another aspect of that," he said. "If you were the prison warden or the prison guard, you would have a concern that the conditions of a prison not be so lousy because a prison that goes below, let's say constitutional, standards, it's obviously a dangerous prison."

Afterward, the talk-show host said she was impressed. "If his accomplishments in New York are measurable," Mrs. Romney said, "he should be someone we should look at."

A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 1994, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: THE MAYOR; Giuliani Takes Political Roles In Other States. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe